Taking the train route from Madison Wisconsin via Chicago on March 1, 1864, Muir crossed the international border at Windsor, Canada West, which later became the Province of Ontario. Alighting somewhere in present southern Ontario, his purpose was to botanize and pursue his inventions. He explored the area bounded by lakes Erie, Ontario, and Huron over the following several months.
He spent the spring, summer, and fall of 1864 exploring the woods and swamps, and collecting plants around the southern reaches of Lake Huron's Georgian Bay. Muir hiked along the Niagara Escarpment, including much of today's Bruce Trail. In May of 1864, he had penetrated northward as far as Simcoe County. On the 18th of that month he started on a three weeks' ramble through Simcoe and Grey Counties, walking an estimated distance of about three hundred miles. During July he was botanizing north of Toronto in the Holland River swamps, and on highlands near Hamilton and Burlington bays. In August he is again about the shores of Lake Ontario and in the vicinity of Niagara Falls, which he described as "the grandest sight in all the world."
ith his money running low and winter coming, he reunited with his brother Daniel near Meaford, Ontario, who persuaded him to work with him at the sawmill and rake factory of William Trout and Charles Jay. Muir lived with the Trout family in an area called Trout Hollow, south of Meaford, on the Bighead River.
He did not leave Canada until March of 1866, when the rake factory burned down.

Was John Muir a Draft Dodger? by Harold Wood. Essay details the timeline of Muir's Canada sojourns, and specific locations, showing that Muir did not go to Canada to evade the Civil War draft..

Meaford, Ontario -(Offsite-Link) - Muir wrote,
"When I came to the Georgian Bey of Lake Huron, whose waters are so transparent and beautiful,
and the forests about its shores with their ferny, mossy dells and deposits of boulder clay,
it seemed to be a most favorable place for study... In a beautiful dell, only a mile
or two from the magnificent bay, I fortunately found work in a factory where there was
a sawmill and lathes for turning out rakes, broom, and fork handles, etc."
Muir worked at Trout's mill for a year and a half, greatly improving the efficiency
of output of rake handles by making efficiency improvements. But on February 21 of 1866, the factory building and all of its contents took fire, thus ending Muir's Meaford sojourn.

Phoro of John MuIr Stone with quote 'Happy the man to whom every tree is a friend' at entrance to Lochend Woods. The stone is of Dunbar Marble from the old quarry to the south of the town. Photo by Jim Thompson.

John Muir's Last Journey - Press Release about Muir's travel journals and correspondence covering his travels to Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile - fulfilling his life-long dream to explore the Amazon and to see the famed Monkey-Puzzle Tree.

John Muir Geotourism Center - Educational organization, growing out of the John Muir Highway project, promoting exploring, learning, sharing, and preserving the natural environment for mental, spiritual and physical development, as exemplified in John Muir's life.

Muir first visited Lake Tahoe in October-November of 1873, calling it the "queen of lakes" and writing his friend Jeanne Carr that he had "sauntered through the piney woods, pausing countless times to absorb the blue glimpses of the lake, all so heavenly clean, so terrestrial yet so openly spiritual." He wrote further, "The soul of Indian summer is brooding this blue water, and it enters one's being as nothing else does. Tahoe is surely not one but many. As I curve around its heads and bays and look far out on its level sky fairly tinted and fading in pensive air, I am reminded of all the mountain lakes I ever knew, as if this were a kind of water heaven to which they all had come." [Source: Letters to a Friend, 1915]

Muir returned to Tahoe several other times in his life, enjoying its "delightful" beauty.

In 1898, Muir took a final trip to Florida, at the age of sixty, which itself was replete with color and incident.

One dramatic occurrence was the finding of Mrs. Hodgson, who had nursed him back to health on his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf. The incident is told in the following excerpt from a letter to his wife under date of November 21, 1898:

The day before yesterday we stopped at Palatka on the famous St. Johns River, where I saw the most magnificent magnolias, some four feet in diameter and one hundred feet high, also the largest and most beautiful hickories and oaks. From there we went to Cedar Keys. Of course I inquired for the Hodgsons, at whose house I lay sick so long. Mr. Hodgson died long ago, also the eldest son, with whom I used to go boating, but Mrs. Hodgson and the rest of the family, two boys and three girls, are alive and well, and I saw them all to-day, except one of the boys. I found them at Archer, where I stopped four hours on my way from Cedar Keys. Mrs. Hodgson and the two eldest girls remembered me well. The house was pointed out to me, and I found the good old lady who nursed me in the garden. I asked her if she knew me. She answered no, and asked my name. I said Muir. "John Muir?" she almost screamed. "My California John Muir? My California John?" I said, "Why, yes, I promised to come back and visit you in about twenty-five years, and though a little late I've come." I stopped to dinner and we talked over old times in grand style, you may be sure.

Muir lived in Indiana from the spring of 1866
through June, 1867, working in a carriage-parts factory. He spent what little
free time he had exploring the nearby forests for their botanical
treasures. When an
industrial accident temporarily blinded him, he wrote, "I
bade adieu to all my mechanical inventions, determined to
devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of
God."

John Muir in
Indiana(PDF) by
Harold W. Wood, Jr. - required research paper submitted to Indiana Historical
Bureau in support of the Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter request for a commemortive
historical plaque in Indianapolis.

"A Genius in the Best Sense: John Muir, Earth, and Indianapolis" by Catherine
E.
Forrest Weber,
in Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, Vol. 5, no. 1, Winter
1993.
A review of Muir's life, with a focus on his early inventions and his time
spent in Indiana,
including his friendships with Catharine Merrill and her nephew Merrill Moores.
Nicely illustrated with Muir
portraits and his drawings of inventions. The issue of Traces that
includes this
article is available as a back issue from the Indiana Historical Society, 315
W. Ohio St.,
Indianapolis, IN 46202-3299; or by calling 1-800-IHS-1830.

While in Indiana, John Muir met and was cared for in his illness byCatharine
Merrill, one of the first woman professors in America.

Hunnewell Arboretum - Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Muir visited this Arboretum, near Boston, in October, 1898, where he
met and had dinner with its founder, philanthroposit and amateur botanist
H.H. Hunnewell.

Moosehead Lake - Muir visited this area near Greenville, Maine, in October, 1898. He described it inn a letter to his daughter Wanda as "a charming sheet of pure water 40 ms. long full of picturesque islands."

Daniel Muir Gravesite - Elmwood
Cemetery, Kansas City - In 1885, John Muir visited Kansas City to see his
father, Daniel, on his deathbed. In late August of that year, John had "the
most powerful inner compulsion" he
had ever known, sensing that he must go east if he would see his father
alive. Muir gathered up his siblings in Portage, Wisconsin and nearby Nebraska,
insisting that they visit their father in Kansas City where he was visiting
Muir's sister Joanna and her family. The family had several days visiting
with the 80 year-old Daniel, who died on October 6, 1885, surrounded by
7 of his 8 children, including John, who later wrote an obituary about
his father for
the Portage Recorder newspaper. Daniel is buried in the historic Elmwood
Cemetery of Kansas City, Block N, Lot 57, along with 2 deceased infants
of Muir's sister Joanna and her husband Walter Brown. In May, 2004, the
Muir-Hanna Trust donated a headstone to
commemorate him.

On his first visit to New York in 1868, Muir stayed on the ship until he sailed to California. He wrote, "My walks extended but little beyond sight of my little schooner home. I saw the name Central Park on some of the street-cars and thought I would like to visit it. but fearing that I might not be able to find my way back, I dared not make the adventure. I felt completely lost in the vast throngs of people, the noise of the streets, and the immense size of the b buildings. Often I thought I would like to explore the city if, like a lot of wild hills and valleys, it was clear of inhabitants."

Late, Muir wrote, "I can make my exhilarated way over an unknown ice-field or sure-footedly up a titanic gorge, but in these terrible canyons of New York, I am a pitiful, unrelated atom that loses itself at once."

Years later, with his friend and editor Robert Underwood Johnson, he visited Central Park, where he ws interested in the clacial scratchings on outcroppings of granite.

In later years, Muir spent time in the Hudson River Valley, visiting friends John Burroughs and Osborn.

Pelican Bay, Upper Klamath Lake - In 1907 Muir visited Edward H. Harriman at his country lodge at Pelican Bay. To encourage Muir's book-writing, Harriman instructed his private secretary to follow Muir around and record in shorthand everything he said. The resulting transcript eventually became The Story of My Boyhood and Youth.

Muir visited the Salt Lake City area in 1877 with the U.S. Geodetic Survey, and wrote of the Mormon pioneer descendents, mountain storm scenery, Utah lilies, and bathing in the Great Salt Lake in several chapters of Steep Trails.

Years later, in 1913, Muir visited the Mormon Tabenacle in Salt Lake City where he heard "memorable organ music," especially "Nearer, my God to Thee," which he described as "so devout, so sweet, so whispering low." (John Muir's August 1913 "Island Park" Idaho journal.)

John Muir's Homestead Video: In
Wisconsin March 25, 2010 - Muir Property
- WHYY Public television interview on location of Erik Brynildson,
the current owner of the John Muir Homestead in Marquette County,
Wisconsin. (off-site link)

America's Secret: "We Had Muir" (about
the purchase of Fountain Lake Farm, John Muir's boyhood home, by a Wisconsin land trust. The newly protected area will adjoin the John Muir Memorial County Park and be part of a larger 1,400-acre natural preserve, which also includes the Fox River National Wildlife Refuge.

Observatory
Hill - Sauntering in the Footsteps of John Muir by Dennis McCann (offsite
link) Now a State Natural Area, Observatory Hill was one of John Muir's boyhood
haunts. - Note - this is a broken link. We suggest you contact the site owner
and ask them why they did not put a re-direct to the new location of this
page.